Buzz be dammed, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles ruled the box office this weekend. The reboot earned an estimated $65 million and Paramount quickly jumped into action. Sunday morning, the studio greenlit the sequel and already set a release date: June 3, 2016. Screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and André Nemec will once again write with Michael Bay and his Platinum Dunes team once again producing. There’s no word if Jonathan Liebsman will direct. Read more about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sequel below. Read More »

Joe Dante‘s Explorers flopped upon its initial release in 1985, but has since gained enough of a following to be considered an ’80s classic today. And like all ’80s classics these days, it’s now getting a 21st century makeover.

Paramount’s low-budget Insurge label is getting the ball rolling on an Explorers remake, with some help from the talents behind Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol and the upcoming Better Living Through Chemistry.

People under the age of 25 might be too young to remember what the names “Simpson/Bruckheimer” meant when appearing in front of a movie. With films like Top Gun, Beverly Hills Cop, Days of Thunder, Bad Boys, The Rock, odds were if Jerry Bruckheimer and the late Don Simpson produced a movie in the Eighties or Nineties, it was awesome. After Simpson’s passing in 1996, Bruckheimer did his best to carry on the legacy. In recent years, he has faltered.

With one of Bruckheimer’s biggest films now delayed, the producer is turning his attention back to another franchise he helped create. Variety reports despite not having anything to do with Beverly Hills Cop III or the failed TV pilot, Bruckheimer is in talks to produce Beverly Hills Cop IV. He’s also still working on Top Gun 2 and developing Bad Boys 3, among other things. Read More »

Briefly: Hollywood is the sort of place where a TV series that fails before it even hits the air can lead to a new movie. Paramount spent years developing a fourth Beverly Hills Cop movie — the series starring Eddie Murphy last hit screens with a third film in 1994 — but that effort eventually stalled out. A TV pilot came into being instead, starring Brandon T. Jackson as the son of Murphy’s title character, with Murphy playing a small supporting role.

Last week, we heard that series wouldn’t go forward. CBS, which ordered the show’s pilot, decided not to pick it up, and efforts to shop it to another network failed. But Paramount liked both the interest in the pilot and the scenes Murphy shot for it. So now a film isn’t just back in development but, according to Deadline, Paramount is “moving fast” with Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec (Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles) scripting. At this point it sounds like Murphy would again star; no word if any ideas from the pilot will be incorporated into the movie, or if Jackson will have a role.

At the start of this week, Michael Bay pissed off Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles lovers everywhere by revealing that the new Turtles film, which he’s producing, will see the central characters reimagined as aliens rather than mutants. Predictably, a firestorm ensued, and even more predictably, Bay responded to the the outrage by stating that “fans need to take a breath, and chill.”

“Our team is working closely with one of the original creators of Ninja Turtles to help expand and give a more complex back story,” he assured them. That “original creator” is Kevin Eastman, and Eastman’s now making it known that he is indeed behind Bay’s vision 100%. Read his comments after the jump.

As far as Paramount is concerned, Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol seems to have come off well and should be a promising lead-in to a new phase of the series in which Jeremy Renner can take over from Tom Cruise. So the architects of that fourth M:I film, screenwriters Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec, have been hired to tackle another big property that the studio wants to revitalize as a franchise: The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Read More »

Earlier this week the rather promising story cropped up that J.J. Abrams and collaborators Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec were pitching networks on a new show with comedy elements that would star Michael Emerson and Terry O’Quinn from Lost? Well, NBC has gone for the show. There’s no season order yet (way too early for that) but this is a step closer to the project hitting the air.

According to Vulture, NBC got the rights to the show and made a pilot commitment. The title we’d reported before, Odd Jobs, was the temp title, but has been left behind. As far as we know, this would still have Emerson and O’Quinn playing former black ops agents, possibly in a suburban setting. Appelbaum and Nemec are the writers and exec producers, with Abrams and Bryan Burk also exec producing. More on this one as we get it.

Briefly: I’m convinced that J.J. Abrams has a closet packed with Abrams clones, as that is the only possible explanation for the steady stream of news we’ve had lately about new projects from the guy. The latest is a report of an Abrams pitch for a new TV show that would reunite Lost‘s Terry O’Quinn and Michael Emerson, aka John Locke and Benjamin Linus, as ‘former black-ops agents.’

Vulture has the report, saying that Abrams and collaborators Josh Appelbaum and Andre Nemec were pitching a ‘comedic drama’ tentatively called Odd Jobs, which would bring together Emerson and O’Quinn as the agents. This is just the latest news of a possible show featuring the two actors, which began in February when the pair said they were working on a possible post-Lost project. (One possibility mentioned then was a show that would feature the two as ‘suburban hit men,’ which could have become this setup.) At this point it is just a possibility, but it’s a ramping up of several months’ worth of rumor, so stay tuned…